Engaging with Empire

Two new texts contribute to a growing body of scholarship that reads African American literary culture at the turn of the twentieth century as artistically inventive, thematically diverse, and critically important to our understanding of African American literature and the racial politics of the United States. Though often neglected by scholarship as a literary-historical focal point in favor of early black writing or the Harlem Renaissance, these new texts capture the creative depth and political urgency of the period, focusing especially on writers and texts that have yet to receive thorough scholarly attention. While John Cullen Gruesser’s The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home examines black writing in response to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American expansion, the essays in Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs show how lesser-known black novelist and Southern Baptist preacher Sutton E. Griggs—who unlike many of his black contemporaries wrote from and lectured almost exclusively in the South—hugely contributed to an era of “imaginative writing by black writers.” Together, both texts provide comprehensive and engaging analyses that further probe the relationships among black writing, literary aesthetics, and racial politics at the turn of the century and thus help strengthen our collective knowledge of pivotal developments in African American literary and political history.

Positioning empire as integral to African American literature at the turn of the century, Gruesser builds on the transatlantic turn in literary studies as well as earlier trends in scholarship that have read American literature through empire (Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan) and empire alongside race (Gretchen Murphy). Eliding a regional or topical approach, Gruesser limits his study temporally: he examines a commendably wide range of African American writers’ responses—poetic, novelistic, dramatic—to American expansion from the early 1890s to the mid-1910s. In his introduction, Gruesser writes that he, in part, seeks to “bring African American literary studies to the study of political history rather than simply bring political history to African American literary studies.” To assess whether or not he accomplishes this requires a clarification of the established task: what exactly is the difference? Gruesser is attentive and bold in his analysis of the era’s difficult and idiosyncratic literary material. He is disinterested in reductive glosses or neat, simplistic summations of the period’s literature and is particularly attuned to its authors’ diverse political allegiances.

Although beginning with the somewhat tired Du Boisian refrain of the color line, Gruesser quickly moves to dismiss a binaristic treatment of black responses to empire. He argues that black authors often did not maintain fixed positions on the subject of overseas expansion—in fact, their positions varied based on the location of the war in question, the moment in the writer’s own career, and whether African American soldiers appeared in their texts. Nonetheless, what does remain fixed is the authors’ immense stake in the conversation about empire; while many white Americans may have viewed the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars as relatively minor, the battlefield itself and the subjugation of nonwhite peoples abroad served for many African Americans as either a literal space to assert their patriotism or as rhetorical ammunition to address racial violence at home. Gruesser emphasizes that African American responses to empire abroad typically voiced national and local concerns about racial violence and discrimination under Jim Crow.

The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home is divided into two main parts: the first considers African American literary responses to the Spanish-Cuban-American War and the second focuses on African American literary responses to the Philippine-American War. Each part features a chapter devoted to American verse and prose by writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Frances...